What marketers really want to see

Today, marketers want one thing from us that we don't provide. They want proof that their spending with us is working.

We give them access to focused vertical audiences. We give them environments filled with relevant content. We offer targeting online and in print. But we don't give them the backend research that shows what the real results were.

I am aware that we all do some pre- and post-publication measurement, but we need to start providing more sophisticated analytics. Marketers are adding "marketing dashboards" and doing much on their end to try to track their campaigns, but we can also add software and lead scoring and lifetime value metrics to work with our audiences and prove that we often are giving them much more than we think.

In the rush to deliver many leads, we lose sight of the fact that often one lead from a b-to-b medium may be worth hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars.

We recently worked with an advertiser whose product was software that scores leads. This software told this company that if it closed the leads we provided from a webinar, it would result in more than $800,000 of future business. That's pretty good from a $20,000 investment.

If marketers need metrics, certainly business publishers can find ways to provide them. Whether it's awareness or lead generation that an advertiser wants, we now have much greater access to software and data to prove what we all know: advertising does work.